ABSTRACT
One of the abiding images that has come down to us of Solzhenitsyn’s youth is that of deprivation and poverty. Lev Kopelev, his close friend in later life, once pointed out that the origin of Ivan Denisovich’s celebrated thrift in Solzhenitsyn’s first published story was to be sought not simply in the author’s labour-camp experiences but also in his straitened and hungry childhood, which had left an indelible mark on his character. Collectivization was the result of a tangle of motives on Stalin’s part, but a principal cause had been the winding up of the New Economic Policy in 1928 and the replacement of a free market for foodstuffs by requisitions and coercion. To Taissia and Solzhenitsyn’s endemic difficulties of trying to live on one small salary was now added a general situation of widespread shortages and hunger.
